Deutsche Grammophon issues 62-disc set of Maurizio Pollini’s recordings

Deutsche Grammophon has issued a 62-disc box set collecting the complete recordings of the pianist Maurizio Pollini, who died in 2024. The new edition expands a 2016 release made for his 75th birthday and adds work from his final years; it includes a Blu-ray disc and a couple of DVDs.

Pollini first rose to prominence after winning the 1960 International Chopin Piano Competition at 18, the youngest winner and the first Italian to take the prize, and then spent 18 months studying with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. He was widely noted for a technique that critics sometimes called "superhuman" — Arthur Rubinstein said, "technically, he already plays better than us on the jury" — and his work divided listeners between admirers of his clarity and those who found his playing emotionally cool.

The box set includes, among other highlights, four prizewinning performances from the 1960 competition on CD for the first time and the striking 1972 debut LP pairing Stravinsky and Prokofiev that announced a modernist manifesto. Reviewers trace a peak in the 1970s, with landmark Chopin and Beethoven recordings, followed by more uneven later decades as Pollini rerecorded repertoire and, some critics wrote, showed signs of waning technique.

His final recordings prompted mixed assessments — a late revisit of the late Beethoven sonatas drew criticism for blurriness, while a last all‑Schubert album with his son Daniele contained both heavy and luminous moments.